Featured in Architecture & Design

Monal Daxini presents a blueprint for streaming data architectures and a review of desirable features of a streaming engine. He also talks about streaming application patterns and anti-patterns, and use cases and concrete examples using Apache Flink.

Featured in AI, ML & Data Engineering

Joy Gao talks about how database streaming is essential to WePay's infrastructure and the many functions that database streaming serves. She provides information on how the database streaming infrastructure was created & managed so that others can leverage their work to develop their own database streaming solutions. She goes over challenges faced with streaming peer-to-peer distributed databases.

News

In a recent blog post, Microsoft announced a public preview of their neural network-powered text-to-speech capability, which is part of their Azure Cognitive Services offering. Within this release, the service makes computer generated voices indistinguishable from actual recordings. This technology has applications in chatbots, virtual assistants and converting digital text into audio books.

Treat your support team well and they will treat your customers well. Support teams need to be trained and trusted, they deserve autonomy and ownership over their work. Bots shouldn’t be used in customer support to help people solve problems; people need to help people even if it’s more expensive than hiring robots.

Tomorrow’s company has to invest in well being, should move away from individual silos to team delivery, needs to have psychological space and safety, and must be able to deal with uncertainty. To build such companies we can use gamification, pretotyping, IoT, artificial intelligence, robots, chatbots and other conversational interfaces. We should focus on teams and question how we work together.

Chatbots are becoming more critical to developers in their daily lives – from understanding how the technology operates, to creating better code. Developers tend to have a natural curiosity about bots and the tech behind it. Artificial intelligence tools exist to address emotional intelligence with chatbots in conversational interfaces.

The UK arm of German supermarket company Lidl has launched a Facebook Messenger-based chatbot, designed to help customers choose the right wine to compliment their food or occasion.The chatbot, named Margot, uses a unique approach to NLU and can interact with shoppers to provide answers to frequently asked questions, pairing wines with food, finding a wine and taking a quiz.

The developer keynote at JavaOne on Tuesday focused on communication and Oracle’s cloud offering. Oracle provided an update on Oracle Developer Community, the relaunched OTN that was announced at JavaOne last year, and provided a number of demos and overviews of Oracle Cloud.

Robert Enyedi, software engineer at eBay spoke at QCon New York 2017 Conference about ShopBot personal shopping assistant application. ShopBot, launched in late 2016 based on Facebook Messenger bot, leverages AI components and the eBay user data to provide shopping options in a conversational style.

Recently Tasytt launched Obie: a Slack chatbot for company knowledge. Teams can ask "what", "how", or "where" questions. Obie either finds the answer in one of your documents, or will ask you to provide him with the answer so he can give it next time someone asks the same question.
InfoQ reached out to founder and CEO Chris Buttenham to ask him about Obie.